Tor team suspects NSA and GCHQ leakers are tipping it off about vulnerabilities

The anonymity network Tor has always enjoyed a paradoxical relationship with the U.S. authorities – part-funded by the State Department and previously the military; targeted by the NSA – but this is something else. Tor operations chief Andrew Lewman said in a BBC interview published Friday, that people in both the NSA and the U.K.’s GCHQ have tipped off the Tor team when those spy agencies found flaws in its software. That lets the team fix those vulnerabilities quickly, where they might otherwise have gone undiscovered. Lewman suggested this happened on a “probably monthly” basis, though this is all a “hunch” based on the expertise on display – Tor takes anonymous bug reports.

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